When he became a
clergyman he did not cease to be a man, with all a man's capacity to
love and to be loved, and so, though he fought and prayed against it,
he had seldom brought a sermon to the people of St. Mark's in which
there was not a thought of Anna Ruthven's soft, brown eyes, and the
way they would look at him across the heads of the congregation. Anna
led the village choir, and the rector was painfully conscious that far
too much of earth was mingled with his devotional feelings during the
moments when, the singing over, he walked from his armchair to the
pulpit and heard the rustle of the crimson curtain in the organ loft
as it was drawn back, disclosing to view the five heads of which
Anna's was the center. It was very wrong, he knew, and to-day he had
prayed earnestly for pardon, when, after choosing his text, "Simon,
Simon, lovest thou me?" instead of plunging at once into his subject,
he had, without a thought of what he was doing, idly written upon a
scrap of paper lying near, "Anna, Anna, lovest thou me, more than
these?" the these, referring to the wealthy Thornton Hastings, his old
classmate in college, who was going to Saratoga this very summer, for
the purpose of meeting Anna Ruthven and deciding if she would do to
become Mrs.
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